Engineering Manager and Evangelist

Time For a New Browser Survey

With the release of Mike Chambers’ Macromedia News Firefox Extension, I figured it was about time for another browser poll. A year ago, I created a browser poll and found that IE was in the lead (among people who read my weblog, at least) with 49.55%. Firebird was in second place with 17.68%, Safari in third with 15.73%, and Mozilla was in forth place with 10.14%. The total number of responses were 1,233. If you have a second, take the new poll to the right and let’s see where we are a year later.

Why is this information important? If you’re a web developer, which I’m guessing you are if you’re reading this, you already know the answer. Although we all try to make our work accessible to as many people as possible (which often means on as many different browsers and platforms as possible), it’s almost always necessary to draw a line somewhere, especially now that many of us have made the transition from tables and fonts to CSS and styles, or even Flash or DHTML. Which browsers do you spend time testing on? Which browsers get highest priority? Is it ok if your app is broken or maimed in certain browsers? In order to answer any of these questions, you have to know the numbers.

I know that this poll is not necessarily representative of the demographic who uses our applications, but it’s been my experience that the trends we see with technologists are often the trends which eventually make it into the mainstream.